About this episode

Michelle Hutchinson discusses the potential mistake EAs are making by neglecting political actions.

I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what's most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That's great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing various of these alongside what we’re most focused on. I think more attention is starting to go to this - as evidenced by Jeff's blog post about how he thinks political donations should be his primary method of giving going forward. But I think we probably have a ways to go. Political actions look better than they used to I think it's pretty unsurprising that EAs are sceptical of lobbying policy makers as a theory of change. By my lights, it looked decidedly less effective a decade ago. At that point, work on existential risk was very speculative, and mostly needed additional research. It was totally unclear what better legislation would [...] --- Outline: (00:56) Political actions look better than…

People in this episode

Guests: Michelle_Hutchinson, Michelle Hutchinson

Topics covered

• political engagement
• effective altruism
• activism
• existential risk
• donations

Keywords

• effective altruism
• political actions
• Pause AI UK
• activism
• donations
• existential risk

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Pause AI UK

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